The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
During mating of connectors, a better guiding device is not always designed between a receptacle and a plug. Thus, in the mating process, it always takes much time in alignment, and the plug and the receptacle cannot be smoothly mated due to any small-angle offset or misalignment of the plug, which may even cause structure damage on the connectors.
The U.S. Pat. No. 7,226,314 discloses a receptacle connector, which has an insulating body and a guiding shell. The insulating body includes a mating groove defined by a top wall, a bottom wall and two side walls. The mating groove penetrates through a front end surface of the insulating body. The top wall and the bottom wall are provided with a plurality of terminal slots communicated with the mating groove to accommodate a plurality of terminals. The guiding shell is provided with an accommodating space formed by an upper plate and two separating plates, the upper plate bends to the accommodating space to form two elastic arms, and the guiding shell is located at a front end of an opening of the mating groove of the insulating body.
In the patent, the guiding shell is fixed to the front end of the opening of the mating groove of the insulating body. When the receptacle connector is mated with a plug connector, the plug connector can effectively provide quick positioning of the vertical position under the guiding of the elastic arms, so that a tongue plate of the plug connector is accurately inserted into the mating groove, and the plug connector is accommodated in the accommodating space of the guiding shell, thus shortening time wasted by alignment failure during connector mating. However, in the patent, when the tongue plate of the plug connector mates with the receptacle connector, although alignment in the vertical direction can be accurately provided, there is no solution provided for the problem of alignment in a horizontal direction. When the connectors are mated with each other, the tongue plate is prone to a left-right offset due to inaccurate alignment in the horizontal direction, so that the terminals are prone to left-right offset. In particular, the terminals adjacent to the two side walls are offset seriously. That is, the offset of the terminals adjacent to the two side walls is greater than that of the terminals located between the top wall and the bottom wall, so that the terminals adjacent to the two side walls may be damaged due to excess extrusion with the corresponding terminal shells, thereby affecting the service life of the receptacle connector.
Therefore, a heretofore unaddressed need to design a novel electrical connector exists in the art to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.